HP's Loss Is Europe's Gain

Mike Lynch, the co-founder of a software company sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion, has co-founded a venture capital company.

So is that where (some of) Hewlett-Packard's money ended up?

Mike Lynch, arguably Europe's greatest technology entrepreneur in financial terms, has resurfaced as a co-founder of Invoke Capital, a venture capital fund with the aim of bringing European technology to global significance.

For those of you who are struggling to remember who Mike Lynch is: He is the Cambridge mathematics graduate who co-founded Autonomy, a specialist in the computerized search of unstructured data using adaptive pattern recognition and Bayesian statistics. He led Autonomy as CEO before selling it to Hewlett-Packard Co. for about $11 billion in October 2011. HP wrote off $8.8 billion of the value of the deal the following year, and Lynch left the company amid claims that Autonomy's accounts prior to the sale had been misrepresented, claims that have been denied. (See: Top 10 tech blunders of 2012.)

And now Lynch, along with a number of former colleagues from Autonomy, has raised $1 billion for Invoke Capital to invest. The first startup to benefit from Invoke's money is Darktrace Ltd., a cyber security company, based on mathematical research out of the University of Cambridge.

Darktrace's technology is based on a new branch of Recursive Bayesian Estimation theory. Does that sound familiar? Rather than trying to lock down all aspects of software to keep security threats out, Darktrace operates on the premise that the network has already been infiltrated and assesses risks including human operators.

And Invoke is different from most venture capital firms. It has a dedicated R&D division based in Cambridge that is assessing problems facing industry and looking for researchers who might have solutions. In particular, Invoke wants to focus on fundamental technology being developed in Europe and help it scale across multiple global markets in areas including genomics, security, pattern recognition, signal processing, and big-data.

Europe has long had the reputation of producing excellent academic research at its extensive network of world-class universities but of struggling to turn that research into commercial success. Such success that Europe does produce is often snapped up at a low price by foreign giants. Autonomy was obviously an exception to that; and now Invoke, with money to spend, intends to be part of a developing financial infrastructure that wants European technology to earn yet more off-continent revenue.

HP, by its own actions, has admitted it paid too much for Autonomy. However, it has not been established that Autonomy did anything wrong.

I think that for historical and cultural reasons Europe in the second half of the 20th century and to date has been poor at the global commercializaton of many of its scientific and engineering discoveries and research.

Meanwhile Silicon Valley has been very successful but nonetheless Silicon Valley venture capital is starting to look like a bit of bubble that has come and gone. It funded hundreds of fabless chip companies as the digital revolution worked its way through a phase of consumerization. But the venture capitalists, a bit like sharks, have to keep moving on to find underexploited domains where they can maximize their chances of making a fast buck. Many of them are now much more focused on software than hardware and on silicon for energy rather than silicon for IT.

Money always flows down hill to try and find a new energy minimum.

But it is interesting to me (and the reason I wrote the article) is that there is a new venture capital company with a declared focus on UK/Europe that might help address that inability to exploit European IP although it too will likely focus on software rather than hardware.

Interesting slice of "us vs. them" paranoia from chipmonk0. I can see this as a set of shenanigans by this Lynch guy, but when it expands to a European / English plot to steal intellectual capital from HP the story gets a little thin. The reality is that the world is a very small place these days and ideas cross geopolitical boundaries very easily. It is true that IP legalities have not caught up with this reality, particularly since companies like HP exist in practically every country on the planet and tend to choose the rules from the ones that benefit it the most in their arguments. That doesn't make them evil or wrong, just a company looking for the best advantage.

Peter, my sense is that an equivalent story could have been written about some instance of American exploitation of European IP. Is that how you see it, or is there a case to be made that there is a genuine imbalance of trade here?

has been going on for at least a Century since WW I. Churchill perfected it into an art and played the US like a violin. He even goaded the US into Cold War so as to hang on to his British Empire ( the real Evil Empire, whose genocidal crimes are only now coming to light ) which crumbled anyway. Ever since, the Brits have clung to their First World pretensions by turning into Camp Followers and Parasites off the US. HP was only the latest victim. Anglophilia is a dangerous retrogression for these ex - Colonies. Admiring the Beatles and the BBC inevitably leads to exploitation by mega fraudsters like Mike Lynch or the London Whale.